After moving it to its new home, the web server at my office decided not to boot up. The server runs on CentOS4 and is configured to perform updates daily. It choked during init and the last messages shown before the system froze are as follows:

As a server administrator, there’s nothing that bugs me more than services that die all of a sudden. For a web server, an hour’s down time could mean losing a few hundred visitors. This could translate to a loss of advertising income too if you serve ads on your web pages.

I found a snippet of code that I modified to use as a simple service monitoring and restarting tool that I would like to share with all of you.

One priceless benefit of having a web hosting provider that gives you SSH access to the server is that there’s a wealth of command line tools that can make data management very easy for you. In this post, I’m going to illustrate how you can use some of MySQL’s command line tools to back up (export) and restore (import) your database.